George Will at the Washington Post on universities’ prestige

 GW is on target.

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The leakage of universities’ prestige amid protests is most welcome

Do not emulate the Chicago politician who said he would not “cast asparagus” at opponents. Do cast aspersions at “elite” (just a synonym for “expensive”) institutions of what is still called, despite an ocean of contrary evidence, higher (than what?) education.

Parents paying $89,000 for a child’s year at Columbia University might be nonplussed about the university’s explanation of its recourse to remote learning: “Safety is our highest priority.” Clearly education is not.

Otherwise, the university, instead of flinching from firm measures to make the campus conducive to learning, would have expelled all students participating in the antisemitic encampment that panicked Columbia into prioritizing “safety.” Imagine how stern the institutional responses would be, nationwide, if the antisemitic and anti-American disruptors of education were violating really important norms by, say, using inappropriate pronouns.

Given academia’s nearly monochrome culture, most universities have many infantile adults. These are faculty members who have glided from kindergarten through postdoctoral fellowships (these often support surplus PhDs, who are being manufactured faster than the academic job market can absorb them). To such professors, the 99.9 percent of the world adjacent to campuses is as foreign as Mongolia.

Still, suppose you want to hire a recent college graduate for your business. Suppose one of your applicants attended Harvard while it was becoming an incubator of antisemitic agitations. And suppose the other applicant attended a large public university. The public university graduate is at least marginally less apt to be enthusiastic about Hamas, which aspires to complete the Holocaust.

Or suppose you seek a young doctor to join your medical practice. You might reasonably hesitate before hiring someone from UCLA’s medical school. There a recent pro-Hamas guest lecturer in a mandatory course on “Structural Racism and Health Equity” led students in a “Free Palestine” chant, directed them to get on their knees and touch the floor in a “prayer” to “mama earth,” and warned the future doctors against the “crapitalist lie” of “private property.”

The leakage of prestige from politicized universities is overdue and wholesome. Those schools that once were preeminent and now are punchlines might soon have a bruising rendezvous with real politics, which, unlike the sandbox radicalism of campus playgrounds, can be serious.

Government policies have encouraged the growth of universities’ endowments and funded their research, because institutions of higher education have hitherto been considered valuable contributors to the nation’s welfare. These policies can be changed if policymakers reassess the merits of an education sector that is hospitable to vicious extremism and adversarial toward U.S. national values. Wealthy private universities, echoing progressive clamors for more aggressive taxing of the rich, should not be surprised or scandalized if government heeds the clamors by turning its covetous gaze toward their endowments.

Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute has an explanation of the self-satisfied adolescents engaged in histrionic campus politics: Their clenched fists indicate that they have too much time on their hands. Hess notes that a recent survey of four-year college students found that 64 percent claim to put “a lot of effort” into school work. But fewer than a third of these toilers in the academic salt mines say they devote even two hours a day to studying.

In 1961, full-time students studied an average of about 40 hours per week; by 2003, the figure was 27 hours. It is likely fewer two decades later. Time-use data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that, from 2003 to 2014, full-time college students devoted an average of 2.8 hours a day to classroom instruction, homework and other educational activities.

Unsurprisingly, the decline of studiousness has coincided with rampant grade inflation. At Yale in the 2022-2023 academic year, only prodigies of underachievement managed to miss the bounty: Almost 80 percent of grades were A’s or A-minuses.

The decline in students’ academic efforts has also coincided with the rise of their performative politics. “Activism” — an interestingly contentless category — can fill the vacuums in the lives of bored students who are unchallenged by unexacting academic standards and who have been indoctrinated by teachers to think highly of themselves as political moralists.

Back at Columbia (which, when it was King’s College, gave the nation Alexander Hamilton), a revolutionary evicted from university housing is suffering for his idealism. The 27-year-old student in the School of Social Work says he now must find off-campus housing that will accommodate his emotional support rabbit.